Cooler in the 70s: Computers

Imagine a world where the internet belonged only to the military, and the world's fastest supercomputer is six feet high, about 12 feet across, and still 40 times slower than the machine you're using to read this. You're living in the 70s, my friend, where computers were strange devices that only mad scientists and war-hungry generals used. Us lowly peons didn't get to see a computer until about 1978, and then you could barely play Pong on it. Before that, we feared these infernal devices, thinking they would take over the world, like in Colossus: The Forbin Project, rape our women as in Demon Seed, kill all our astronauts like HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in Dark Star, they control bombs that refuse to explode. For most of the 70s computers barely touched our lives, we lived in a world of typing pools, carbon copies, and real (as opposed to icons of) filing cabinets. We balanced check books, paid for things in either cash, Diners Club cards, or Green Shield stamps. Whatever we bought had a little sticker on it with the price, and the cashier at the register would check that, type it in and you'd see the price come up spelled out on big bakelite tabs in the register window. If you wanted money, you needed to go to the bank when they were open. If you wanted to call someone, you used a rotary dial phone and if you wanted to send a letter, you had to write it out with a pen and shove a stamp on it. And wait. Sometimes more than two whole days. For a reply. If you were lost, you needed to find a place that sold maps. If you're out somewhere and need to call someone, you'd have to find a phone booth. If you wanted someone to read an article you'd read, you would either handtype it and pay for a printer, and hope you can sell it on the street or at gigs or nightclubs, or you'd need to find an established magazine to publish your thoughts. In the 70s, your only possible ways of talking to the ether to people you've never met and getting some kind of instant reply was crank-calling the operator, or getting a CB radio. Even on radio the signal to noise ratio was about 100:1.

Ah... It was all so much simpler back then before that stupid Cray came out...

;-)